When Fastest meets the Fastest: Build High-Performance Services on Aptos
Carrying on the series of blogs about NodeReal and Aptos, this article will take a closer look at how NodeReal leverages its strengths to build and maintain high-performance services on Aptos.
One of the strengths of NodeReal is how we can accelerate our speed while maintaining high performance. The ability to do both is exactly why NodeReal can keep up with the Aptos network and its rapid developments.
From Aptos Incentivized (AIT) 1 and 2 in the past to the latest AIT3, coupled with a rising number of projects on the Aptos ecosystem daily, NodeReal is proven capable as an infrastructure partner of Aptos.
With the mainnet over the horizon, NodeReal is building top-notch performance services to support Aptos. Let’s dive in to see how we are doing exactly this.
Aptos Incentivized Testnet Recap: The battle of the best Validators.
The road to Aptos Mainnet comprises a series of Aptos Incentivized Testnets (AITs). AITs are there to ensure the collective efforts of the community to be ready for the production-grade Aptos Mainnet.
With the established reputation, Aptos has managed to attract the best of Node operators, developers, auditors, and ecosystem builders to join and contribute to its Incentivized Testnets. NodeReal is proud to not only be one of them but ranked amongst the best.
The results of AIT1 and AIT2 clearly indicate NodeReal’s best-in-class performance as a Validator. NodeReal Ranked 21 out of 110 and 12 out of 226 in AIT1 and AIT2 respectively, achieving 100% liveness and participation rate.
AIT3 is scheduled for the 30th of August, with about 225 participants. NodeReal participated in AIT3 this time with two validators and achieved 99.8% proposal reward measure and 100% liveness. As a result, we ranked 11 and 13 on the AIT3 leaderboard.
How NodeReal maintain the highly Reliable & Scalable Validators on Aptos？
Auto Scale Built on Terraform, ArgoCD and Helm chart
When hosting a highly scalable Aptos node, it is important to assemble the computing resource and secure/flawless orchestration solution. To ensure scalability, NodeReal uses Terraform and ArgoCD to automatically scale the resources in AWS Kubernetes. Add-ons like aws-load balancer-controller, aws-node-terminator, cluster-autoscaler, ebs-CSI-driver make it possible to seamlessly autoscale the clusters’ computing capacity. Along with ArgoCD, NodeReal can duplicate the deployment through ArgoCD Application Set to multi-EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service) clusters with multi-regions. For now, NodeReal operates nodes in the US, Singapore, Europe, and Tokyo and keeps growing.
Furthermore, Nodereal has extended an in-house maintained helm chart on top of Aptos official version. Utilising the existing ArgoCD integration with EKS (which was proven effective for other BlockChain Nodereal deployed). ArgoCD constantly monitors for changes in the target Nodreal’s GitHub Enterprise repository and deploys the new changeset in a fast and reliable manner. Together with ArgoCD’s Application set, this means Nodreal is able to quickly deploy multiple Aptos-node in multiple clusters/regions using common templates and customise region/cluster-specific helm values.
Monitoring, Alerting and Automation
Nodereal implemented a scalable monitoring solution with VictoriaMetrics, Cloudwatch and Grafana orchestrated on top of Nodereal’s pool of scalable EKS clusters.
Infrastructure-based metrics/alerting (CPU, RAM, storage, network IO, request per second) are carried over from its existing work. Aptos-specific metrics and monitoring are built on top of several proven resources such as Aptos Core Repository and Aptos Monitoring on Github to detect specific Aptos-related alerts like when consensus rate is low, or when the txn rate is low, and when there are high failed proposal rates.
Automation is also in place (and more to come) and is integrated closely with the Aptos Partners Slack channel. As one of the Aptos Partners, Nodereal will get the first level of important/P1 notification from Aptos, e.g when there’s a bugfix patch released, a NodeReal slackbot will pick this up instantly and automatically raise PR code changes for approval in GHE.
Build High-Performance REST APIs on Aptos
NodeReal has also ported some important features from MegaNode to Aptos REST services, such as IP affinity, and cache. IP affinity will provide a consistent block height between consecutive requests; while cache will reduce the bandwidth consumed to have a faster response time. Global Accelerator routes traffic to the nearest available endpoint according to user IP in which NodeReal uses AWS’ global network infrastructure to keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low. The coordinator provides a consistent block height view between consecutive requests and uses redis to cache REST responses to improve performance.
In future, we will develop Mega Aptos Node to support REST service without deploying Aptos Fullnode. Mega Aptos Node is a high-performance virtual fullnode with high availability and can scale up at a very low cost.
Super Fast is The Future of Web3.
Many milestones have been achieved, yet, the journey ahead is still very long. NodeReal is constantly improving its own performance in order to enlarge the potential of Aptos which can bring further benefits to its community and other players in the ecosystem.
Aptos can satisfy 100K TPS transaction volumes, which will be one of the fastest blockchains. NodeReal will provide the super-fast node and API service, and also try to establish comprehensive stress testing to ensure no latency in super high QPS (Query Per Second).
Upon Aptos mainnet, NodeReal will launch REST API services. You can start to try our Devnet service from here.
Celebrate 1 Year of NodeReal with Special Promotion
NodeReal turns 1 year soon! We’d love to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have supported us along the way. Here’s the celebration filled with 2 month of product promotion, in-person meetups, giveaways, and more! Read more HERE.
About NodeReal
NodeReal is a one-stop blockchain infrastructure and service provider that embraces the high-speed blockchain era and empowers developers by “Make your Web3 Real”. We provide scalable, reliable, and efficient blockchain solutions for everyone, aiming to support the adoption, growth, and long-term success of the Web3 ecosystem.
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